League of Legends Developer to Ban, Publicly Shame Toxic Players

Riot Games is rolling out a new initiative to spurn racist and homophobic players.

Riot Games is finally taking steps to shut down toxic players in its popular MOBA title League of Legends. Riot’s lead designer of social systems Jeffrey Lin revealed the same on Twitter. Those who exhibit toxicity will either be banned for 14 days or permanently.

Over on Reddit, Lin said that each permaban case was reviewed individually. “Today is the start of tests where we’ll be using a new machine learning approach + Player Support manual reviews to target extreme cases of toxicity (such as intentional feeding, racism, death threats, homophobia, etc) and handing out pretty severe penalties such as 14-day or permanent ban.

“In the past, we’ve avoided publicly naming and shaming players; however, we’ve learned in recent months that being transparent is extremely critical to the playerbase’s trust in our systems, so we’ve decided to do a compromise. If players complain about unfair bans for this particular system (so, have a ban year code of 2500), we’re going to be fully transparent and posting the chat logs that resulted in the ban.”

Lin later noted on Twitter that, “It is somewhat amusing that the people angry at this are openly spamming me with racist slurs.”

What are your thoughts on Riot’s new measures? Let us know in the comments.